Allotment artists find beauty in the cabbage patch

I love my allotment for many reasons. I’ve had it for over 10 years and I love it for the fresh air, beautiful produce and the intimate connection it gives me with the seasons. My mother, Cath Read, has a great love of allotments, too, but she is no gardener. She is a professional artist, and her interest is more in the aesthetic than the edible.

While I could wax poetic on the social and community benefits of allotments, would man barricades to protect their wildlife value, and have read every book that has been written on their heritage and historical value, Mum sees an allotment and is moved to artistic feats. She is more concerned with the rhythm of rows of bean poles and with capturing shafts of autumn sunlight through bonfire smoke than she is with the produce or the problem of what to do with prunings.

Allotments on MontmartreCredit:
Vincent van Gogh/Alamy

She is not the only one similarly inspired. While few of the great artists have made allotments their muses – van Gogh’s series on the vegetable gardens at Montmartre is among the exceptions – a quick Google search reveals hundreds of plots rendered in watercolour, oils and pastels by gifted amateurs. Perhaps this is a sign of the increasing democratisation of art: as more people find time and space to paint, they look to the landscapes around them. And, with so many people living in cities, our most accessible natural landscapes are often allotments.

The history of paintings of allotments has also been the story of working-class art. Allotments turn up in the paintings of Jimmy Floyd, one of the Ashington Group, otherwise known as the Pitmen Painters, a group of colliery men who began painting in the Thirties via the Workers’ Educational Association and went on to national acclaim. At first the group was encouraged to study great artists and to paint pictures based on abstract ideas from mythology, but they soon began creating works that captured the colliery and the life around it.

Floyd painted several that included allotments, though with an emphasis on pigeons rather than vegetables. His Miner’s Hobby shows a miner absorbed in tending pigeons in a brightly painted pigeon cree and backed by lively green allotments, while behind loom the dull grey blue chimneys and slag heaps of the colliery. “I don’t talk about art, I paint it, if possible,” he once said, reflecting the ethos of the group. The work itself was eloquent enough.

At the other end of the scale, Beryl Cook – loved by the public, but overlooked by the art establishment – also painted an allotment, with requisite buxom woman busily hoeing. With Cook’s interest in chronicling the everyday life of people around her and her warm sense of the comic, plots full of busy and contented gardeners must have been irresistible. My mother’s interest in allotments has its roots in her father’s allotment in Carmarthen, rented to him by the factory for which he worked.

Blooming VegCredit:
Cath Read

“Companies really looked after their workers then,” she says. “They often provided land to help supplement the wages, and in Carmarthen the factory gave plots to everyone that wanted one. We were living in rooms at the time, so for me and my sister the allotment was our playground. The light and the greenery were wonderful, and I loved to see what the allotment holders did with their patches.” She believes this early experience helped her appreciate the beauty of the allotments that she was drawn to paint later in life.

“I call my paintings peopled landscapes: I like to capture the ways that we make our mark on the land, and so I paint tree lines, ancient terracing on hills. I seem to be drawn to any place where there are man-made patterns in nature. Allotments are a perfect example, I find them very inspiring.” My mother likes to paint on a flat plane and is aided in this by her local geography.

“Lots of the allotments in Bristol are on steep hills, and if I can find a spot opposite them then I have a canvas full of plots laid out before me. I’m sure it’s hell for the allotment holders, but it’s wonderful for me.” In her allotment paintings, it is the rhythmic patterns of crop rows, boundaries and sheds that catch the eye, most often highlighted by low morning or evening light, or by snow.

Fulham Palace allotments in snowCredit:
Christopher Miers

London landscape painter Christopher Miers, who frequently paints Fulham allotments close to his home, also has a passion for allotments in snow. He paints in the “plein air” style (out of doors, direct from the subject) and impressionistically, so he values the way the allotment landscape and light change so dramatically throughout the year. “In summer, there are flowers of different colours to lead your eye through the landscape,” he says. “In winter, colourful buckets and sheets of plastic have the same effect. When there is snow on the ground, the impact of these splashes of colour is even more pronounced. There are changes to the allotments every week and with every season: vegetation grows up or is cut down, beds are dug up or grassed over, flowers come out and then die.”

Miers paints these allotments again and again, partly because of proximity but also because this changeable nature suits his quick style of painting. “A composition is basically an arrangement of horizontals, verticals and diagonals, and allotments are a gift in this respect, with horizontal paths, vertical poles, and diagonals in the branches of trees. I love the allotments because they offer interest and variety more or less wherever you look. You only have to move a few yards left or right and you can find a different composition.”

Day of the RaceCredit:
Chris Cyprus

Artist Chris Cyprus lives in Mossley, in the Pennines, between Manchester and Oldham. It is a part of the country once filled with cotton mills and where workers’ allotments were created in great number as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, and have become ingrained in the culture. It was an allotment that put Cyprus on the path to becoming a professional artist after a back injury forced him to stop work as a builder. “I was already painting and I had decided to research the insides of sheds for some paintings, so I visited the local allotments simply as a way of tracking down more sheds. But when I got there I started talking to a few of the plot holders and looking around, and it was like finding treasure, an epiphanic moment. I saw something that day. I’d had no direction, but I set myself the project of painting only allotments for 12 months. Ten years later, I’m still doing it.”

Having never gardened before, Cyprus began helping out on the plot of one of the men he met that day. Old Bob has since died, but Cyprus still tends his allotment. He paints in various styles for different subjects, but his allotment pictures are boldly coloured, naive and rhythmic. His interest is in capturing northern life, and he almost always includes characterful figures on his plots, as well as patterned rows of crops. Cyprus has become what he calls a “seasonal painter”.

Red DoorCredit:
Chris Cyprus

“Just as there are some seasons that are busier for the gardener and some quieter, I prefer to paint the allotments in spring and autumn,” he says. “Artistically, I don’t like summer on the allotment; it is too green and full. In spring and autumn, you can see the structure.” In summer, he turns his attentions to painting brass band competitions and the local canal boats.

There are many people who look at allotments and see nothing but mess, jumble and a landscape desperate for a good tidy-up – though often such people have some ulterior motive and an eye on future development. It is good to discover that those of us who see beauty in wiggly paths, cabbage patches and tumbledown sheds are in excellent and artistic company.